This project was a moving sculpture that made a wave in a sheet of fabric, that was an assemblage of pieces of a modular fabric design I created. It was exhibited in a design exhibition at GDP in Paris, and is now installed at the Ex)situ lab at INRIA Paris. [video]

This project began because of this modular fabric I created for a digital fabrication class at Université Paris-Sud, and evolved into this mechanical sculpture to be exhibited at this design exhibition. The modular fabric was a design challenge from this course: create a fabric out of non-traditional materials using parametric pieces fabricated on a laser cutter.

More about this process can be found on my WikiFactory page.

While I learned a lot about the process of digital fabrication in this design project, there was very little design challenge as the possibilities were effectively limitless – it didn't have enough requirements to inspire innovation and creativity. This inspired me to focus on the exhibition instead. Very early I had the insight that an intriguing way to display fabric is to imply what is underneath using the shape – not unlike the snake that swallows an elephant and looks like a hat in the Little Prince.

This began my exploration into what I could cover. I was reading the biography of Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson at the time, and so my fabric design was inspired by his obsession with the spirals of water, so I was going to cover water. BUt I didn't want to simply float a piece of fabric in water, but I wanted the water to make waves to demonstrate the folding patterns in the fabric.

The practical limits I had in power to generate waves (which is super hard!), as well as in my knowledge of electronics and fluid dynamics, gradually turned me to a mechanical wave machine. I started experimenting, using servomotors, to drive a wave pattern through the fabric.

While perhaps not as honest as literal waves in water, creating mechanical waves created new opprotunities and challenges to create an aesthetically pleasing piece to display. After various prototypes and experimentations at smaller scales, I created the final piece using a sheet of the fabric, which was hung from a laser cut piece of wood with piano wire. This form provided new opportunities to view the sculpture from beneath as well as from the side.

The exhibition was quite successful, and a creative design professor from Université Paris-Saclay asked if it could be installed in her lab, where it now resides.